Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Apple is behind the Intel Ultrabook

Greg Welch, Project Director Ultrabook, responded to questions from the Wall Street Journal about the investment of Intel in Ultrabook and admitted that Apple was partly responsible for the efforts of the founder. Mr. Welch said at the outset that the success of the iPad and MacBook Air are primarily responsible for $ 300 million provided by the Intel project Ultrabook.

The other information, more interesting in our opinion, is that Apple has given an ultimatum to Intel in him saying that if the founder could not break the consumption of its chips, it would look elsewhere. Welch says that Intel was then attached to meet the expectations of Cupertino and would have revised its roadmap to deliver processors Sandy Bridge.

The question before us is to know what chip Apple used in its computers would if he had left Intel. We believe that ARM processors are out of question. The work required to run Mac OS X on this architecture would be too great and the performance would suffer too much to make it interesting.

This leaves AMD has the merit of distinguishing himself with his last chips Fusion (see "AMD APU A8-3500M: Llano file"), but whose performance remains far from i5 used today ' hui. It's still fun as the firm at the apple does not hesitate to wave the green spectrum to motivate Intel to find solutions to offer chips consume less.

For the record, the slim Ultrabook is a computer with a processor or Sandy Bridge Ivy Bridge very low consumption. Intel is now working with Asus to get out from models that compete with the MacBook Air is currently the reference model in this regard. The concept is not new and there are already interesting alternatives from Sony and Asus, but the idea of Intel is to push the concept of ultra-thin laptop.

Thus, the founder hopes that future models will not exceed 21 mm thick.